Straw Dogs April 7, 2008
Posted by Phineas in : Film , trackbackJust watched the movie Straw Dogs (1971) with Dustin Hoffman. An amazing, intense and strange movie. Hoffman plays an American mathmetician married to a young British woman who relocate to her tiny village so he can work on a book. It’s a gothic sort of thing with these ominous menacing local characters in the town and working on repairing the couple’s garage roof.
The centerpiece of the film is a horrifying rape scene in which two of the workers rape the wife while the husband is away on a hunting expedition. The rape involves one man who believes that he loves her, and that they share an intimate history. As he rapes her, she fights back and resists, but clearly expresses contradictory responses. She responds with apparent pleasure in between fits of struggling and unequivocal resistance. This is obviously a source of controversy. The second worker intrudes upon the scene, and after the first one finishes, the second one rapes her. This rape appears to shock even the first rapist, and the woman this time screams and resists with no ambiguity of response.
So you have a really shocking sequence — a “good” rapist and a “bad” rapist. The “good” one sort of deluded himself into thinking he had a right to her body, that the experience was sexual and not violent, that he cared about her and she cared about him. That “bad” rapist was more of a classic violent act.
Dramatizations of rape in film are obviously fraught with complications. What’s the right way to do it, if at all? I thought it was incredible that Peckinpah was willing to dramatize it this way. A gang rape is not one crime, it’s multiple crimes. And each crime has its own kind of violence. Morally we wish to make no such distinctions. To draw out such distinctions is rare and daring and frankly dangerous.
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